How Do You Make a Difference?

It doesn’t matter if you are a Bobby Kennedy fan or not. This quote is right on target. We can all make a difference by making things better. But, how do you do this? How do you make things better? The best way for me to explain my experience with making things better is to give some examples of what not to do!

Example 1: During a financial crisis, if you are going to provide help to small businesses, don’t let big businesses take the money earmarked for the small businesses. We all get the fact that almost every company is hurting, but a “real” small business rarely has the resources to compete with companies that are publicly traded! And banks, shame on you. Once again, you made life miserable for small businesses. We get it! You don’t like us because our deposits are in the 3 and 4 figure range, not the 6 and 7 figure range. It takes a bunch of us to make your bottom line look bigger, where one or two of the big guys can do the same thing. But, we employ a whole lot of people and we make our communities better!

Example 2: When masses of people get laid off or furloughed due to no fault of their own (it’s the virus which kicked the crap out of the economy, Stupid!), don’t make getting unemployment compensation so darned hard to sign up for and qualify for! Dear state of Michigan: why the heck do laid off state workers automatically get signed up when small business workers have to spend weeks trying to get the forms filled, frequently get told the amount they qualify for is far less than they really qualify for, so they file a formal protest and then are asked for documentation out the wazoo! Come on folks! You are messing with people’s lives here. We get the whole problem! We understand! But that doesn’t make things any better! As a society, we have to do better.

When we decide to open society back up, don’t start with things that focus only on the less necessary aspects of our lives. I need a haircut, my lawn needs mowing, and I’d really like to get out on my boat! But how necessary are those things. People need to work, to create products and services that the world wants and needs. And, when people go back to work, let’s not let carriers of the virus get into situations where they can infect dozens of people and start the pandemic all over again. Let’s make sure that those who restart our economy are either immune or virus free. No work without a test and if you don’t have immunity, your place of work should be checking your temperature and pulse ox at least once a day! And for goodness sake, don’t let workers go back to work without appropriate personal protection gear for the jobs they are doing and the environment they are doing their work in!

Life will never be the same, nor should it be! We weren’t doing it right to begin with so we shouldn’t go back to the same wrong ways in the future. If somebody is sick, they should not be goaded into coming to work anyway and infect the entire workforce. We have to make the health of our people our top priority. Without people, nothing gets done and even more important, without people there’s no reason to do any of it anyway!